On May 19th, Robert Margouleff’s autobiography, titled Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, Devo, The Synth Revolution and My Life Behind The Music, arrives on Jawbone Press, chronicling his life in music so far. It’s arriving in print, digitally, and even as an audiobook. With a career spanning about seventy years, Grammy Award winner Margouleff is best known for his foundational work with synthesizer music, from Stevie Wonder’s early era to Devo’s big hits, but that’s really only scratching the surface of his varied and interesting life behind the console, and even in the development of surround sound for the filmmaking industry.
As an engineer, producer, studio owner, and pioneer of electronic music, Margouleff’s success has been built on key ideas he developed early in life about music and the people who make it. These turn upon the human element in every musical performance and the value inherent in musical moments that will never be recreated in exactly the same way again. While Margouleff is not alone in feeling that way, there were plenty of other, more exacting, less human recording trends underway throughout his career that he resisted. Reading Margouleff’s biography will help music fans understand why he has been so sought after by musicians as a Producer, and why the music that he worked on has been so impactful. I spoke with Robert Margouleff about his wide-ranging life, and what you’ll find below is just a small fragment from among the stories you’ll find in Shaping Sounds.
I think this is a really well-written book that puts readers inside scenes and places and focuses on a lot of detail to make them feel part of the story. I feel like you’re quite open about your life and inclusive, too.
I just write what I feel, but I also know that you have to paint pictures with words, in a book. Being a filmmaker, photographer, and audio person, I really need to set the scene and always be sure to give enough detail so that people develop situational awareness of what I’m talking about. I want to give a feeling of place and time. I think that’s important.
Maybe it was the cinematic quality I noticed, because I feel like I could visualize the different scenes and chapters as different eras. Writing is work, but adding that level of detail is more than many books do. Maybe it’s that you have a really good recall for colors, textures, and people!
I really kind of worked on it. I didn’t have to invent anything; all I had to do was look backward a bit and do my best to remember. I had family members, like my nephew Claude, who, during the Ciao! Manhattan days, tailed me around a lot. When I started writing the book, I was able to interrogate his mind as well as his own, and he brought back many recollections from that time. They were different observations than I had, since I was living inside the film at that time, I was living with Edie. It’s very different when you look at the situation from the outside, versus looking from the POV of someone in the milieu.
Throughout the book, many people had memories of my adventures, so to speak. Here I am now, 60, 70 years later! I am living in a little cottage in what I like to say is the lint of the bellybutton of Hollywood, California, looking back on it, both the highs and the lows. But I think you go through cycles in your life, and that’s pretty evident in my writing, as well. I didn’t think I had it, as a writer, at all when I started. But I believe now that I’m an author, and I’m actually a published author, which is quite a reach.
I’ve always spent my life behind the curtain, or as I like to call it, at the dead end of a mic, as a recording engineer, and the mic has always been pointed at someone else. Now, here I am, and here’s the microphone. I’m at the live end of the mic for a change. I’ve been something like a puppet master in a recording studio, getting artists to perform to the limits of their potential by using my insight. Now, other people are doing this to me!
That’s right, you worked with Jim Reilly on this book, so maybe he was doing a little bit of the puppet master act on you!
When Jim came on board, the book was pretty much written, but he’s an amazing man and has become a great friend through it. He has a lot of empathy for me and has been absolutely remarkable. Dan Cavanaugh, my friend of forty years, is also managing me, and has witnessed my wily ways, you might say. So I’ve had a lot of guidance and support on this. I’ve come to realize that writing a book isn’t entirely a solo thing. It takes a team of people to write a book. You can write the words, but somehow they need to be shaped; they need to be directed. You also need help getting your book in front of people. We don’t live our lives in isolation.
The stories from your childhood really set the scene for the musical developments in the 60s and 70s for me. It shows that continuum of change.
I was indoctrinated into music from an early age because my dear sister Jacquelin, who is 93 right now, was going to Juilliard when I was a little boy. We had a beautiful piano in what we called the sun parlor. It had a tile floor, with an oriental rug on top, and a Steinway, and that was the only thing in the room. She’d be practicing Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, and I would be under the piano, playing with my toys. She practiced four or five hours a day.
In sixth grade, I got a cello, and my family rented one of the school’s instruments. She played the piano, and I played the cello. I still listen to classical music every single day. So I grew up loving sound, loving music, but not Pop music. It was mostly keyboard music. But I never really found my voice until I found the synthesizer. And I found that because of Ciao! Manhattan. I called it my first “above-ground, Underground movie.” I wanted to bring the underground filmmaking vibe to a wider audience.
What I did was get professional gear and put it in the hands of creative people. That unraveled in a kind of strange way, which you can read in the book. Edie Sedgwick was an incredible person, and I met some other incredible people. They were strange, too. Andy Warhol, the Factory, all that was an adventure in itself. It was a lifestyle as well as a film. When I heard a synthesizer for the first time, playing at a nightclub in the East Village, called Cerebrum, I thought, “I could use this to score Ciao! Manhattan.”
I’ve learned to love the synthesizer more than I love making movies. I was asking, “How can I find my voice? How can I find my focus?” When I found the synthesizer, I realized I’d found my voice. It took all my musical training to develop a sense of what music was about and to understand what needs to happen in a recording studio. I wanted artists to be able to really perform and not feel encumbered by that.
You worked very closely with Malcolm Cecil, as well, didn’t you? Did he fuel your fire for pursuing these ideas?
When Malcolm Cecil came on board, my partner during the Stevie [Wonder] adventures, he was sort of the same as me. He’d grown up in the Jazz clubs of London. He was in the band behind Ronnie Scott’s, which was a major Jazz club. Jazz artists used to come across the ocean. He was not only a superior technician but also a superior player. He filled in all the holes in my background, and between the two of us, we started to really develop TONTO, The Original Neo-Timbral Orchestra. Which we actually planned on a paper tablecloth across the street from Media Sound. It was a Chinese-Spanish restaurant, and we’d be over there writing stuff all over the tablecloth with our pens every night at seven o’clock. We had an idea for what we wanted to do: create an orchestra of synthesizers to play live. It was designed to be a single instrument played by two people simultaneously.
Was this for public performance?
Yes, and that’s what we did several times. But I found out, once again, that I did not want to be on stage! I’m happy in the gears of the machine. That’s where I’ve always been happiest. [Laughs] But that’s where I come from. I’ve been very single-minded about it.
I think the book gets that across. I think you pay a lot of tribute to things that you know made your journey possible. There’s a lot of warmth there, particularly about artists. You seem to value when they are not entirely predictable.
Right, there has to be something that creates expectation. I think that’s one reason that people go to listen to live concerts. It’s to see something that’s not going to happen again. That person might play that same song on tour twenty-five times. How many times has Stevie played “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” in the past fifty years? When he plays it live, it’s not the same every time. It’s that magical, beautiful, shimmering perfection of imperfection, as I call it, that brings humanity to the music. In order for that to flower, a person can’t feel threatened in the studio. They have to feel that they can be totally emotive. I understand it, because I’ve been there. With Stevie, that’s what we had, especially in the beginning of the three or four years that we worked together.
He was so young when you first started working with him.
In my mind, he’s still 21. We’re still friends. I did a session with him two or three years ago on a synthesizer. I was a little rusty, and it wasn’t the same as having Malcolm there. We had the most amazing relationship two creatives could have. You do not know that you’re inside of something like that when you’re inside of it.
You’ve had other eras in your career, too, like going to California and working in film.
When we came to California, Stevie really wanted to be close to Motown. He now had his own idea of what to do. The Record Plant was really a psychedelic masterpiece, where you could go there and live there, and no one would even know you were there. It was 24/7 and secure, with someone always at the front desk. There was a jacuzzi room, and a boat room with portholes, but the thing was, they weren’t for rent. If you went there and worked for two weeks, you could live there. They were always building something. I became chief engineer there many years later, around the time of Devo.
We were working in “Quad recording” [aka Quadrophonic sound], but it was too esoteric a way to release music. We built a room for it, and it became a remarkable tool for recording, instead. I could put Stevie, or Billy Preston, or Devo, in the middle of the control room, and have the background vocals behind them. And the keys over here, and the drums over here, and the rhythm guitar over there. You could hear all the music, and suddenly, when the music had always been objective, looking at a band inside a proscenium arch, all of a sudden, we were occupying the same space as the music. All of a sudden, it shifted from an objective experience to a subjective one. Where you were involved in the music, and you were inside the band. That turned out to be an extremely valuable tool for creating space to make music.
The recording experience for the artist will be very different based on that, and that’s positive for them. It’s more organic for them, isn’t it, to record that way?
Exactly. And that was the tool that we used for years. I used it with Devo for “Whip It.” It was a very different band, but with the same simple instrument setup. It’s still Pop music. That ability of Quad in the control room was a tool to get artists to really perform and to really understand what they were doing.
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